Thursday, January 24, 2008

Do You Think Your Text Messages Are Private?

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff Christine Beatty (pictured above) probably thought so when they both lied under oath about their romantic relationship last summer at a police whistle-blower trial that cost the cash-strapped city more than $9 million, according to records obtained by the Detroit Free Press. (Note: Kilpatrick is married, and he and his wife Carlita have three sons.)

Kilpatrick and chief of staff Christine Beatty denied during testimony in August that they had a sexual relationship. But the records, a series of text messages, show them engaged in romantic banter as well as planning and recounting sexual liaisons.

The newspaper examined nearly 14,000 text messages on Beatty's city-issued pager. The exchanges, which the Free Press obtained after the trial, cover two months each in 2002 and 2003.

6 Comments:

Aside from that, I am not sure what economic principle it illustrates.

The opportunity cost of sending 14,000 text messages? The mathematical odds of hiding that many messages? Trade offs between work & pleasure? The mathematical odds being in a relationship where you receive more than a handful of love letters during courtship?

Still, it gave me a smile which does have a utility value in and of itself.

Regulatory costs of $1.14 trillion absorb 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), which was $13.06 trillion for 2006.

If regulatory costs are combined with federal fiscal year 2006 outlays of $2.654 trillion, the federal government’s share of the economy reaches 29 percent.

The Weidenbaum Center and the Mercatus Center jointly estimate that agencies spent $41 billion to administer and police the regulatory state in 2006. If one includes the $1.142 trillion in off-budget compliance costs, the total regulatory burden reaches $1.183 trillion.

The 2006 Federal Register contained 74,937 pages, a 1.4 percent increase from 2005’s 73,870 pages. Both the past two years are down from 2004’s record-high 75,676 pages.

Well over 48,000 final rules were issued from 1995 to 2006—that is, during Republican control of Congress.

While regulatory agencies issued 3,718 final rules, Congress passed and the president signed into law a comparatively low 321 bills in 2006. Considerable lawmaking power is delegated to unelected agencies.

In the 2006 Unified Agenda, agencies detailed 4,052 regulations now at various stages of implementation throughout the 50-plus federal departments, agencies, and commissions.

Of the 4,052 regulations now in the pipeline, 139 are “economically significant” rules with at least $100 million in economic impact. That number implies at least $13.9 billion yearly in future off-budget costs.

Economically significant rules in the works increased slightly between 2005 and 2006, from 137 to 139.

The five most active rule-producing agencies (the Departments of the Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, and Commerce, plus the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA)—with 1,791 rules among them—account for 44 percent of all rules in the Agenda pipeline.